CHANGE DETECTION OF A SCENE FOLLOWING VIEWER LOCOMOTION CHANGE DETECTION OF A SCENE FOLLOWING A VIEWPOINT CHANGE: MECHANISMS FOR THE REDUCED PERFORMANCE COST WHEN THE VIEWPOINT CHANGE IS CAUSED BY VIEWER LOCOMOTION

When an observer detects changes in a scene from a viewpoint that is different from the learned viewpoint, viewpoint change caused by observer’s locomotion would lead to better recognition performance compared to a situation where the viewpoint change is caused by equivalent movement of the scene. While such benefit of observer locomotion could be caused by spatial updating through body-based information (Simons and Wang 1998), or knowledge of change of reference direction gained through locomotion (Mou et al, 2009). The effect of such reference direction information have been demonstrated through the effect of a visual cue (e.g., a chopstick) presented during the testing phase indicating the original learning viewpoint (Mou et al, 2009). In the current study, we re-examined the mechanisms of such benefit of observer locomotion. Six experiments were performed using a similar change detection paradigm. Experiment 1 & 2 adopted the design as that in Mou et al. (2009). The results were inconsistent with the results from Mou et al (2009) in that even with the visual indicator, the performance (accuracy and response time) in the table rotation condition was still significantly worse than tha